There Is a Spiritual Solution to Every Problem

Our desire to realize the presence is an integral part of the unexplainable dynamic that creates life. When we actively meditate on a chosen spiritual ideal or even a given personality we are expressing our desire by inviting the presence to be accessible.

I suggest that you begin this process of realization by visualizing the presence you seek. Create an inner picture of yourself receiving divine guidance and banish all doubts about its validity. Realize that there is no need to explain or defend as you go within yourself. In silent desire to realize your spirit, know that your invitation will be accepted. You will find that your picture dissolves into the reality of a presence that is accessible within yourself. This is realization. It is a personal experience beyond anything related to an intellectual exercise. With practice and desire, in quiet meditation, you will experience the presence.

There are times the intellect will persist, trying to make your experience fit the reality of the material world. One way to think about this process of moving toward realization is to envision a magnet. See yourself as the magnet, which is attracting to you all that you have recognized and acknowledged as true. Then gradually become aware of a greater magnetic force, which pulls you toward higher truths. The effort is not exclusively your own any longer. You are in a kind of metaphysical magnetic field, which draws you in the direction of your realization.

I have had this experience of realization in my own life for the past several years. When I enter into a state of deep meditation I am abundantly aware of a magneticlike force, which pulls me in the direction of God. The revelations that I experience in those moments of God-realization represent a renewal of my mind. I reconnect to a kind of energy that propels me in the direction of a solution to anything that might be troublesome.

For example, something as mundane as purchasing a piece of property for my wife and myself to move to when our children leave the nest, was causing me a great deal of inner turmoil. I reminded myself to move into that invisible magneticlike field of energy and I was guided toward a solution. At precisely the right moment a friend called and said one sentence that put me at ease about the dilemma. Done! This is what I call realization in action.

We can all use this realization of the availability of spirit in the resolution of problems. As you learn to employ the first step, recognition of spiritual solutions, you will move to a state of realization in which you experience the power. You will realize that every kind of disharmony, discord, or disease is amenable to the spiritual energy that is in you.

THE THIRD OF THREE STEPS FOR ACCESSING SPIRITUAL DIRECTION

Reverence: Communing quietly with the spiritual force is our way of becoming one with it.

This third step, reverence, is acquired quickly by some people, while for others it can take a long time to achieve. Communing quietly with the spiritual force and becoming one with it means there is no sense of separation. We know our divinity and commune with that part of ourselves. In other words, we see ourselves as a part of God; we are in a state of reverence for all that we are. There is no doubt of our divinity. In this state we fully experience this quote from the Bible: “On that day, you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you” (John 14:20).

Quietly communing with God, when we are searching for guidance, is a way of temporarily turning off our ego-mind. Instead of our ego-self thinking, “I can fix this,” we are willing to immerse it into our higher self. Like a drop of water separated from its source the little mind is unable to create and sustain life. When the drop of water rejoins the ocean it has all the powers of its source. The drop of water separate from its source symbolizes our ego-self when we are separated from our source of omnipotent power.

Communing quietly allows us the direct experience of knowing a spiritual solution to every problem. With our divine connection we are always in touch with the solution. Problems persist when we fail to recognize, realize, and finally, quietly commune with our own source, power, spirit, God.

I often think of Abraham Lincoln watching his beloved Union crumbling under the energy of hatred that engulfed this country. He wrote, “I have been driven many times to my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had no where else to go.” “To my knees,” is a way of saying, “I surrender to my source and turn this huge problem over to that same power that moves the stars.” You can do the same thing in times of strife. “Let go and let God,” as they say in the recovery movement.

When you practice communing quietly with spirit, you will sense the presence of a sacred partner. You can turn your problems over to this “senior” partner and move to a place of peace. The Indian saint Sri Ramakrishna used the following parable to teach his devotees how to reach the state of direct union with God.

A disciple once came to a teacher to learn how to meditate on God. The teacher gave him instructions, but the disciple soon returned and said that he could not carry them out. Every time he tried to meditate he found himself thinking about his pet buffalo.

“Well, then,” said the teacher, “you meditate on that buffalo you’re so fond of.”

The disciple shut himself up in a room and began to concentrate on the buffalo. After some days, the teacher knocked at his door and the disciple answered: “Sir, I am sorry I can’t come out to greet you. This door is too small. My horns will be in the way.”

Then the teacher smiled and said: “Splendid! You have become identified with the object of your concentration. Now fix that concentration upon God and you will easily succeed.”

The message is so clear. Become one with spirit and do not doubt or fear your divinity. Move beyond your ego-mind into your higher self. (I will not detail here the path to transcending the ego. I have devoted an entire book to this subject—Your Sacred Self.)

There is a spiritual solution to every problem. The three basic steps to access your connection to spiritual solutions to problems in your life are: recognition, realization, and reverence.

The balance of this first chapter discusses my meaning of the key words of the title of this book. I believe the definitions I use for spiritual, problem, and solution can form the basis for a unique way of bringing peace and fulfillment into your daily life. It is further my contention that once you internalize these three concepts you will rarely revert to the belief that you face insurmountable problems. Eventually, you will learn that all those so-called “problems” are dissolvable by saturating them with the higher energy of spirit.

What I Mean by Spiritual

It is written in the Bhagavad-Gita, the ancient Eastern holy book, “We are born into a world of nature; our second birth is into a world of spirit.” This world of spirit is often depicted as separate or distinct from our physical world. I think it is important to see spiritual as a part of physical, rather than to separate these two dimensions of our reality. It is all one. Spirit represents that which we cannot validate with our senses. Like the wind that we feel but cannot see.

Two great saints from different corners of the world as well as different religious persuasions have described spirit this way: “Spirit is the life of God within us” (Saint Teresa of Avila) and “Whatever draws the mind outward is unspiritual and whatever draws the mind inward is spiritual” (Ramana Maharshi). The key to understanding spirituality is this idea of our inner world and our outer world—one world, yet two unique aspects of being human. I have a friend who compares the physical to a lightbulb and the spiritual to electricity. He insists that electricity has been around as long as spirituality but that we did not make a religion of it when it was discovered.

Likewise, when I refer to spiritual I do not intend it to be synonymous with religious. Religion is orthodoxy, rules, and historical scriptures maintained by people over long periods of time. Generally, people are born into religions and raised to obey the customs and practices of that religion without question. These are customs and expectations from outside of the person and do not fit my definition of spiritual.

I prefer a definition of spirituality as described in Saint Teresa’s and Maharshi’s observations. Spirituality is from within, the result of recognition, realization, and reverence. My personal understanding of spiritual practice is that it is a way of making my life work at a higher level and of receiving guidance for handling problems. The ways in which I personally do this involve a few simple, but basic practices. I have enumerated them here in my own order of significance.

1. Surrender This is first because it is the most crucial and often the most difficult. For those of us who have grown up believing life is a “do-it-yourself” project it is hard to admit that we need the help of many others just to survive for a day. In order to surrender you must be able to admit to being helpless. That’s right, helpless.

In surrender, my thoughts are something like this: “I simply do not know how to resolve this situation and I am turning it over to the same force that I turn my physical body over to every night when I go to sleep. I trust in this force to keep digesting my food, circulating my blood, and so on. The force is there, it is available, and I am going to treat this force that I will call God, as a senior partner in my life. I will take the words ‘All that I have is thine’ in the scriptures at face value. I am willing to turn any problem over to this invisible force which is my source, while always keeping in mind that I am connected at all times to that source!”

In other words, the spiritual life is a way of walking with God instead of walking alone.

2. Love Activating spiritual solutions means converting inner thoughts and feelings from discord and disharmony to love. In the spirit of both surrender and love I find it helpful to silently chant to myself, “I invite the highest good for all concerned to be here now.” I try to see anger, hatred, and disharmony as invitations to surrender and love. They can be doorways to taking responsibility for thoughts and feelings. They are the entryway to the inner world where spirituality is. With this understanding I have the option to allow spirit to manifest and work for me.

I use a metaphor of a long cord that is hanging from my hip and I have the option of plugging that cord into one of two sockets. When I plug into the material world socket, I receive the illusions of disharmony and actually have the results inside of me. I feel out of sorts, hurt, upset, anguished, and hopeless in terms of being able to solve or correct my problem. When I am plugged in this way I struggle to attain false powers. This struggle inhibits me from receiving mystical or spiritual power. Defining empowerment only in material world terms is a reflection of being spiritually disconnected.

When I imagine this cord being yanked from the material world socket, and replugged into the spiritual socket, I immediately experience a sense of peace and relief from the angst. This spiritual plugging-in metaphor is an instant reminder to me to substitute love for anguish or frustration. I can relax and remember that the spirit is God, which is synonymous with love. Emanuel Swedenborg said it well when he reminded his students, “The divine essence itself is love.” This feeling of love is the substance of what holds every cell together in our universe. It is cooperation with, rather than fighting against. It is trusting rather than doubting. Simple? Yes. But even more so, profoundly effective in resolving problems. Love and love alone dissolves all negativity, not by attacking it, but by bathing it in higher frequencies, much as light dissolves darkness by its mere presence.

3. Infinite Carl Jung reminds us that “The telling question of a person’s life is their relationship to the infinite.” My concept of the infinite includes accepting, without doubt, that life is indestructible. Life can change form but it cannot be destroyed. I believe our spirit is inseparable from the infinite.

This awareness of our infinite nature is terrific for putting everything into perspective. Relying upon the part of ourselves that has always been and always will be alleviates stress in any given situation. “The spirit gives life, the flesh counts for nothing,” the scriptures advise us. All of these things that we perceive as ourselves are of the flesh. In terms of infinity, they “count for nothing.”

When I unplug myself from the material and replug myself into the spiritual I immediately let go of fear, judgment, and negativity. I know that I must bring the energy of the spiritual socket to my immediate life circumstance. Infinite love is what I receive from that new energy source. It has always been there, but now I recognize this infinite power and see myself as having all my circuits flowing with this one source.

4. Empty Mind My spiritual approach to problem solving involves being quiet and letting go of my ideas about exactly how something should be resolved. In this space I listen and allow myself to have complete faith that I will be guided in the direction of resolution. Call this meditation (or prayer if you like); I feel strongly about the need for meditation to nourish the soul and access divine assistance.

Beyond the actual act of meditation is a willingness to empty my mind of my agenda and be open to what will inevitably come to me. I send a message to my ego, which says, “I am going to trust in the same power that moves the galaxies and creates a baby rather than in my own self-indulgent assessments for how I would like things to be going right now.” I relinquish my thoughts to the power that spirit has to make things work and let go of any agenda that interferes with the perfect expression of God within me.

Completely emptying the mind of our agenda leads to forgiveness, which is a vital component of this practice. Getting to a state of emptiness means ridding ourselves of all blame and angry thoughts about what has transpired in the past. Empty means just that, empty. There is no room for hanging on to who did what and when, and how wrong they were. We let it go simply because it is a component of our agenda, and what we want is God’s plan which works, and to toss out our own, which obviously doesn’t. Thus when we empty our mind of our ego-driven thoughts we invite forgiveness into our hearts, and by letting go of the lower energies of hatred, shame, and revenge we create a mind-set of problem resolution.

5. Generosity and Gratefulness Sometimes I feel the necessity to remind myself that we come into this world with nothing and we will exit the same way. So, finding a spiritual solution to every problem involves doing the only thing I can do with my life. That is, giving it away and being simultaneously grateful for the opportunity to do so. Here is a formula that works for me:

• I get back from the world precisely what I put out to the world. Which is another way of stating the proverb “As you sow, so shall you reap.”

• If “Gimmee! Gimmee! Gimmee!” is my message to the universe then the universe will send the very same message back to me: “Gimmee! Gimmee! Gimmee!” The result is I will never feel peaceful and I will be condemned to a life of trying to fulfill all the demands being made on me.

• If my message to the universe is “What can I give?” or “How may I serve?,” the message I receive from the universe will be “How may I serve you?” or “What can I give you?” Then I experience the magic of sending generous thoughts and energy out wherever I go.

I recommend your spiritual practice involve being generous and grateful with your thoughts. The more you send out thoughts of “How may I serve,” rather than “What’s in it for me?,” the more you will heat back “How may I serve you?”

6. Connectedness The Sufi poet Rumi once explained that the terms I, you, me, he, she, and they are distinctions that cannot be made in the garden of the mystics. In spiritual consciousness you view yourself as a flower in this garden and everyone else in the garden connected to you in an invisible way. Then you will feel the assistance that is available to you.

At the level of spiritual consciousness we know we are connected to everyone. Our concerns and difficulties are something we realize that we share with everyone else. Problems do not affect our body/mind/personality, because we have suspended total identification with our body, our personality, and all of its achievements. Instead we begin to see ourselves as the beloved.

Nurture your sense of connection to everyone and God as well. This allows you to remove your ego from conflicts. Do not see anyone as an enemy, or view anyone as an obstacle to fulfillment. This awareness of being a part of everyone allows you to suspend anger and frustration toward others and see them as partners in the resolution of problems.

Know that there are people to whom you are connected who are available to help you find the right job, to solve a puzzling issue that seems irreconcilable, to help you back on your feet, and to resolve financial difficulties. Everyone becomes a compatriot rather than a competitor. This is spiritual awareness as I practice it.

We are not alone. We are not what we have, what we do, what others think of us. We are divinely connected to God and to all of God’s creations, and consequently each of us has an unlimited inventory of resources available for the purpose of helping us to a state of peace and problem resolution.

Being connected means literally that at any given moment of your life, you can ask that the love that surrounds you and connects you to everyone and everything else please guide you right now. Then you relinquish your negative self-talk images and observe everyone and everything that you see as your loving assistant. It is in these moments that the right person or event will materialize and assist you.

I try to remind myself in moments of despair of the beautiful affirmation from A Course in Miracles: “I can choose peace, rather than this.” It works. Or I use this affirmation often: “I see nothing, I hear nothing, I know nothing that is separate from me.”

7. Cheerfulness In terms of outward appearances there is something noticeable about people who have reached a high level of spiritual awareness. They seem to be in a constant state of bliss. In my own life I know that my state of cheerfulness is a reliable gauge of my level of spiritual enlightenment at that moment. The more cheerful, happy, contented, and satisfied I am feeling, the more aware I am of my deep connection to spirit.